Nat and I have known each other and worked together on and off
since the early days of Linux. In 1999, we started
Ximian
to advance the state of Linux, user experience and developer
platforms - with many of our efforts brought to fruition
after our acquisition by Novell in 2003.

Anyone that has had the pleasure to work with Nat knows
that ideas come in one side, and objects of desire come out on
the other end.

In mobile development, we've discovered a great opportunity:
a need for products that developers love. And we are going to
fill this need with great products that will make everyone's
eyes shine every time they use our software.

Development started early this morning, we will first
deliver the iPhone stack, followed by the Android stack, and
then the Moonlight ports to both platforms.

The new versions of .NET for the iPhone and Android will be
source compatible with MonoTouch and Mono for Android. Like
those versions, they will be commercial products, built on top
of the open core Mono.

In addition, we are going to provide support and custom
development of Mono. A company that provides International
Mono Support, if you will.

As usual, your feedback will help us determine which
platforms and features are important to you. Help us by
filling out
our
survey. If you give us your email address, we will also
add you to our preview/beta list for our upcoming products.

Fighting for Your Right to Party

We have been trying to spin Mono off from Novell for more
than a year now. Everyone agreed that Mono would have a
brighter future as an independent company, so a plan was
prepared last year.

To make a long story short, the plan to spin off was not
executed. Instead on Monday May 2nd, the Canadian and
American teams were laid off; Europe, Brazil and Japan
followed a few days later. These layoffs included all the
MonoTouch and MonoDroid engineers and other key Mono
developers. Although Attachmate allowed us to go home that
day, we opted to provide technical support to our users until
our last day at Novell, which was Friday last week.

We were clearly bummed out by this development, and had no
desire to quit, especially with all the great progress in this
last year. So, with a heavy dose of motivation from my
music teacher, we hatched a plan.

Now, two weeks later, we have a plan in place, which
includes both angel funding for keeping the team together, as
well as a couple of engineering contracts that will help us
stay together as a team while we ship our revenue generating
products.

Update: although there was a plan to get Angel
funding, it turns out that we self-funded the whole thing in
the end.

Next Steps

Our plan is to maximize the pleasure that developers derive
from using Mono and .NET languages on their favorite
platforms.

We do have some funding to get started and ship our initial
products. But we are looking to raise more capital to address
the shortcomings that we could not afford to do before, these
include:

Tutorials for our various developer stacks

API documentation for the various Mono-specific APIs

Dedicated Customer Support Software (assistly or
getsatisfaction)

Upgrade our Bug system

Training

Consulting and Support

and Marketing: we have a best of breed developer
platform, and we need the world to know. Our previous
marketing budget is what the ancient Olmec culture
referred to
as Zero.